Alert Level Dropped

Well it has. As of the end of last week we're at 'Severe General' for the first time since July 7 (we were at 'Critical' before).

The reason being that "intelligence sources do not have any specific information relating to imminent repeat attacks."

Not that that's ever stopped them before.

However, the only reason we know about this is becasue the Tories kicked up a bit of a stink about the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre messing with our alert levels behind our backs.

A Home Office spoeksperson has said that "It is Government policy not to comment on threat levels for a wide range of reasons, including security. Advice would be issued if the public needed to take specific action".

By the way, if you want to know how the security scale works, here you go: there are seven threat levels, of which the highest is 'Critical', which means that an attack is expected within two weeks. This is followed by 'Severe defined', 'Severe General', 'Substantial'then 'Moderate'. The lowest level is 'Negligible'.

On 7 July we were at 'Substantial', the lowest we'd been since September 11.

A couple of issues to address here: firstly, you've stated that "our alert level [has] dropped", whereas the original story linked to (and others like) it refer to the "threat level", not the "alert level", which is (apparently) a different matter. Looking for further information on this, I find (from here):

"The Home Office last night would only confirm that the â€œlevel of preparednessâ€ had not been altered."

- which of course can be taken with as large a pinch of salt as suits your taste. My original reason for commenting, though, was pure pedantry - you've said there are seven threat levels and gone on to list only six. What's more, in trying to fill in the blank, I discover the probable source (Wikipedia) commits the same error and makes this likely to be a lazy bit of uncritical cut-and-pasting!

Ahem. Sorry, continue with whatever you were doing...

Maria

Well, I ventured up to the West End on Tusday night and only saw one policeman on my whole journey and that was on a platform at Baker Street. Compared to a couple of weeks ago, the alert / threat level whichever way you look at it evidently has been lowered.